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Thick Grip Handles

This is a short review on two of the thick grip sleeves abounding the internet these days and a specialized pulley handle. These popular little additions help spice up normal training and are alot cheaper than buying thick bars themselves.

The thick grip sleeves that I want to talk about are the Manus grips and the Ironbull Tgrip 2.5. Both are made of very resilient rubber and fit easily onto all the equipment I have, dumbells, barbells, one handed pulley handles etc..all work fine with thee 2 sleeves. The manus grips have a type of knurling on the inside which is marketed as an aid to minimize slipping on the bar. Personally I have found this to make no difference at all. The Ironbull has no knurling and doesnt slip anymore than the Manusgrip. The biggest differences between the two sleeves is that the Ironbull is slightly thicker (at the center) than the manus grip, and it also has a tapered shape to its design, that does feel more ergonomic in the hand. Both of these products come in a number of colours and are very similar in cost. The only downfall with my purchase of the Ironbull 2.5 was with shipping, it took forever to get to me from Canada, roughly 2 months. The company owners were sympathetic and offered to send me more for free if my order did not show at all.

Exercising with these is really only limited by your imagination, some of my favorites are dumbell wrist curls, barbell one handed hook lifts and dumbell rows, but they can be adapted for almost any lift.

An interesting side note is that people with wrist pain when benching often say that their pain when doing this exercise is reduced when using thick bar sleeves, I guess its because the weight is distributed through a larger surface area than before.

Now, this weird cone shaped Handle. This handle was originally purchased on ebay by a Melbourne Armwrestler, I bought it and adapted the shape to being more specific for Hook training. The idea is not mine to claim, I first saw this type of handle on Igor Mazurenko's webshop. Buying from Armpower (Igors webshop/site) is not as easy as it could be so I asked our resident Armbreaker Jesse Johnson who is a fitter and turner to lathe down the original handle to something like the polish version. A month later it came back and was much better than I had hoped, Jesse had also made finger grooves in the plastic. Now if yous are wondering how this helps with hooking the give away is obviously the shape. by holding the handle with the narrow end up by the thumb theres very little pressure on the top fingers and much more on the bottom two digits just like when forcing a hook. Now that my broken pinkie finger has roughly healed I can give this handle a good run and see if it helps me in getting a solid, vice-like hook/wrist.